There have, no doubt, been plenty of topics already started on this topic; and no doubt many have deleted fairly shortly afterwards as they descended into flamewars

I will comment only on the article MR posted here:"For example, piracy has always been a huge problem. Now, that will be much reduced."

No, I think piracy will in all likelihood increase as a result. Activation and copy protection mechanisms have been hacked and cracked since they arrived on the scene two decades or more ago. Cloud based or not; this will be no exception.

As an aside, I'll note that I was one of those two version jumpers. I'm not paying Adobe four times more money than I do now; and I'm definitely not going to pay the (I think inevitable) massive price jump once they have us all exactly where they want us on the upgrade treadmill...

I'm not going to pirate; I'm just going to stop upgrading. Money talks, or in this case money walks.

I'm sure TheGIMP will eventually mature into an excellent product; maybe this will be the impetus it needs!

I thought Michael's piece was measured and on point. The video was the best part. I emailed it to both of my college age kids (each at a different university) and I added "not sure you have heard all the flap about Adobe going to a rental model?"

Both replied that they had heard, kids at school were talking about it, but it was "a non issue for us, since we all use everything we want illegally anyway."

Hmmm. (No jokes about what hoodlums I raised ok?)

But I wouldn't be so sure their protection scheme will be cracked. This is a new model. Probably part of the "every so often" checkin with the mother ship will download new bits such that the scheme changes all the time. I definitely thing one of their goals is to eliminate piracy, and I should think they have thought this through.

I do believe most of their creative suite user base are companies and companies are just fine with the subscription model (that would include my own company).

Basically... people don't like change. I wonder if it wouldn't be quite similar if the situation were reversed. We had always paid $20 a month to use PS. Now they come along and say "errr, it isn't going to work that way any more. You have to pay us SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS now. And then in one year, or two years, another TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS, unless you don't want updates or new cameras supported."

I will comment only on the article MR posted here:"For example, piracy has always been a huge problem. Now, that will be much reduced."

No, I think piracy will in all likelihood increase as a result. Activation and copy protection mechanisms have been hacked and cracked since they arrived on the scene two decades or more ago. Cloud based or not; this will be no exception.

+1 Living in Asia for so long I have what some would consider a worrisome attitude towards copy protection. In most SEA countries I've lived or done business I've observed all but the most westernised or successful local companies either use pirated software, or a good percentage of their software is pirated. Same goes for the Middle Eastern countries I've observed. And of course in these places pirated software, music, movies, are available for one to several dollars at most. A reliably working copy of CS6 complete with the crack that allows it to download the latest updates runs $4 in Thailand's infamous Pantip Plaza. And of course you can find the same but more risky because of the risk of malware.. on most torrent sites.

A software company knows there are several popular ways of getting people to use their product. Sell it. Give it away. Or develop an inadequate protection system knowing full well a great many will pirate their product. They also know this isn't all a downside. There are upsides to having your product pirated. Someone might like it enough to actually buy it, but mostly it increases the user base. If your competitor in Thailand is using the latest best software (for free without penalty) then you'll need to go pay for it to complete. It's more complex than this but you get the picture.

And Adobe or any other company can easily prevent this. So can Microsoft and the others. But if they did, billions would be using some Chinese brand (and paying for it, countries don't let their citizens pirate their own software) and that company would further develop their product into a very good or better alternative that we'd start buying. There is no good solution to the problem other than international cooperation, but even that isn't going to get a private citizen making $150 a month to pay $200 for the latest version of Win7. They'd have to charge roughly the same percentage of the average income.. and then tourist and others would travel and buy it, or create a rampant black market.

So they allow piracy because it benefits them and keeps them on top of the game. Which is all well and good until they take some single mom to court and try and collect $200,000 because her son downloaded the lastest Justin Beiber CD.. Our entire judicial punishment system is predicated on the "make an example of" mindset..

So ya, I agree. CC will become available on torrent sites just like CS6 is now, as well cracks to circumvent the phone in requirement just like there is to circumvent the activation requirement now. And more people will pirate and feel they're justified BECAUSE Adobe changed their policy to something they see as unfair. And face it, any company doubling their price (or worse) will be seen as unfair.

Now let's talk about subscriptions.. something else I've written about forever. Any company that can get their customers to "subscribe" becomes golden. Their worth, their credit, their ability to raise investors, all of it. Subscription is the holy grail of business. Newspapers and then magazines discovered this by accident.. and it really took off.

If you look at what you're subscribing too already: Electricity, water, sewer, trash, in a way a mortgage, cable, internet, cell phones, regular phones, pest control, gardeners, auto leases, and even auto loans are a structured subscription. and then there are subscriptions on top of subscriptions. What you say? Yep, your regular phone and then line protection on top of that. Water and line protection. Cable, cablebox, modem, Voip, AND line protection. The list is very long. When you add to this the average American's credit card debt.. because "payments" like "subscriptions" trick many consumers into buying more than they can afford.. there's nothing left for food. But no worries, many diet companies will send your meals to you. For a low monthly price..

Anyone forgotten what cash feels like? I challenge you to get your next pay check in cash. Hold it in your hand.. look at it. And then go to the post office and start buying money orders for all of your subscriptions. See if that changes your perspective a bit. We rarely hold cash in our hands any more.. it's all electronic. Not real.

Piracy in itself is not an issue, the issue is the loss of revenue resulting from piracy.

This means that the millions of pirated private copies of PS will not generate much money for Adobe even if CC were uncrackable because the owners of most of these pirated copies would not purchase CC or the perpetual version anyway.

It may be different for companies using pirated copies if their business relies on Adobe products.

I've been using Photoshop for a long time - since version 2 (not CS2), and I've bought their Master Collection since CS2, updating to every new edition along the way. So a subscription should, I suppose, be cheaper for me.

But I've always been an owner, not a renter. I go to a lot of trouble to keep all of my computer data files archival. I've got virtual machines that I use just to be able to read the data files from applications made by companies that have gone under. I have terabytes of scanned slides and negatives, which I made so that I could still work with those images, years after they were originally made.

With the new rent-only plan, I have to assume that I will be willing to pay an Adobe tax for as long as I'm still alive, and I'm not willing to commit to that plan.

The pace of innovation has been slowing at Adobe, and I don't see huge changes in the future for most of Adobe's applications. Photoshop has seem some welcome changes of late (well, mostly ACR), but it's something of an anomaly. For the most part, successive upgrades have been minor, and I suspect that more and more people have been opting to only purchase every other upgrade (which must be why Adobe changed their upgrade policy with CS6).

Adobe must be desperate to maintain their cash flow, and presumably decided that this was the only way to guarantee a steady revenue stream. Maybe it will work for them, and maybe it won't. But I think that CS6 will be my last version of Photoshop, and it's pretty certain that CS6 will be my last version of everything else in CS. I don't know what I'll do when Adobe decides to only rent Lightroom.

I teach image processing at a University level, and I won't teach Photoshop-only material any more.

It seems to me that this is a huge opportunity for open source image editors like Gimp, and potentially for another commercial photo editor.

For years, I've admired Adobe's shrewd business sense, and their ability to avoid the mire that Microsoft has dug themselves into. I don't think that way anymore. I really like both Photoshop and Lightroom, but I don't want to be an Adobe customer anymore. I hope that I can support a different company in the years to come.

At least the prices now are more equitable. Used to be that PS was 30-50% more expensive here in Australia. Now the subscription makes it actually cheaper. US$50 = AU$48 or thereabouts.

As to the subscription model - time will tell. But having looked at the cheaper offerings like Elements and Pixelmator I think I do need CMYK, proper colour management and channels. Do other apps offer this? I don't know and I'm not going to trawl through demo after demo to find out what they lack. I have Elements, I just tried Pixelmator and it's great, but only up to a point.

My take is that it's only just on par price-wise for those who have ALL the Adobe products and upgrade every version. For everyone else is will cost more per year in dollar terms. The modifiers are if you really need the apps that are only available through CC (Muse etc) , need the 20GB Cloud space and the web hosting.

So, how much is it worth? Precisely? (put a real price on itdare ya).

How much is GIMP (OSS) worth when it costs $0 to download and use?

Hard question to answer.

Do you quantify its worth in the number of human hours that have gone into writing it?Do you quantify its worth in how much money you save from using it instead of Photoshop?Or do you quantify its worth in some other fashion, such as if I pay $0 for something then it is worth $0?Or do you simply say that its worth is not something that can be measured with money?

From the perspective of a person that also works on OSS, the my goal isn't to create something that sells or is worth money but rather to do something that contributes to society as a whole.

How do you calculate the worth of program that enables the world at large to edit their images without having to pay for the privilege?

Interesting question. It seems you aren't asking how much it would sell for if a price were put on it, but rather for some kind of non-market dollar value that could be attributed to freeware. Assuming that is a meaningful concept, is there any standard way of calculating it, or do you have one in mind? If not, the answer would require a long post which explained and justified the respondent's methodology before coming up with a figure.

At least the prices now are more equitable. Used to be that PS was 30-50% more expensive here in Australia. Now the subscription makes it actually cheaper. US$50 = AU$48 or thereabouts.

Indeed. The upgrade price from PS CS5 to PS CS6 was AUD$307.00. The 18 month price for PS CC is AUD$239.82 (12x9.99 + 6x19.99) - so a 27% saving! Yes of course Adobe is in the position of raising the monthly/annual subscription price, but then they raised the upgrade/new prices each version as well. The thing is that before you could decide to stop upgrading and still have full access to your layered files. Now you will only have access to flattened TIFFs/JPEGs (leaving raw files out it) - if you already have an existing copy of PS.

please donīt be naive.piracy will not be reduced at all.. why should it?there is no technical reason.. the software still runs localy on your PC.server side activation can be cracked... there is no unsolvable problem with that.from STEAM to KMS... there will always be a way for clever reverse engineers.

i think piracy will actually increase. because people who hate the cloud/subscription will now think about using a pirated copy.

and user of a pirated copy donīt have to connect every 30 days.

itīs just the same as with games and NO-CD cracks.in the end the legal customer will be bothered with copy protection mechanism and the warez user laughs....

itīs always the same. from dongles to DVD protection to server side activation.

More than it was a week ago, and less than it will be in the months and years to come, courtesy of Adobe.

Regardless what I think about Adobe's current plans, the solution for me is not Gimp. With Gimp, you are bound to 8Bit color-depth in any color-space called RGB ( which could be sRGB, AdobeRGB,anything else in between). Furthermore, it uses only one core of my CPU, so the performance will not be as good as using PS.For minor changes, you click more than three times of what you do in PS, when you want to work with a better performance, you will have to learn thousands of keystrokes, nearly all different from the one you are familiar with when using PS.

So, to come back to Jeff's question, for me personally, Gimp is worth not very much.

With Gimp, you are bound to 8Bit color-depth in any color-space called RGB ( which could be sRGB, AdobeRGB,anything else in between).

Hi Robert,

Not for too long, they hope. The website mentions;

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Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

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Furthermore, it uses only one core of my CPU, so the performance will not be as good as using PS.

That depends on how well the single core is utilized. It also depends on how well the GPUs are exploited ...

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For minor changes, you click more than three times of what you do in PS, when you want to work with a better performance, you will have to learn thousands of keystrokes, nearly all different from the one you are familiar with when using PS.

Could that have to do with a learning curve? Maybe there are more efficient possibilities to achieve a result, once you learn how? I also see a lot of functions and filters and plugins that offer things that are harder to achieve in Photoshop. I guess it has to do with embracing a tool, and wanting to get to know it, including its idiosyncrasies.

Who knows, it seems there are also contacts with Google (who purchased NIK software), maybe this is the start of something interesting.